Find Anything In Any Building Using AR, Without Downloading an App ft. Caspar Thykier & Connell Gauld
The AI XR Podcast.Show Notes
The AI XR Podcast had a massive news week and one of its best guest conversations of the year. Caspar Thykier and Connell Gauld, CEO and CTO co-founders of Zappar, joined Charlie Fink and Ted Schilowitz to talk about something deceptively simple: helping people find stuff.
Zappar's new product, Spaces, is app-free indoor navigation built on the web. QR code or link in a meeting invite — your phone shows AR breadcrumbs to the nearest restroom, the right meeting room, the hospital ward three floors away. No app download. No specific hardware. No Azure dependency. Caspar put the pitch simply: it's fundamentally just helping people find stuff. Connell's vision: the same technology running in glasses indistinguishable from a regular pair, within four to five years.
AI XR News: Elon Musk's $135 billion lawsuit against OpenAI went to trial in Berkeley. OpenAI's IPO may be pushed to 2027 over its CFO reporting structure and $600B CapEx problem. Meta is laying off 20% of its staff in two waves. Google earnings were up 10% while Meta got punished. Freepik rebranded as Magnifi with $230M ARR and a million paid subscribers. Samsung announced displayless AI smart glasses. Google partnered with Gucci for another AI glasses play. And Google put $40 billion into Anthropic.
Key Moments: [00:03:02] Elon vs. Sam: the $135 billion trial [00:05:09] OpenAI's IPO in jeopardy — CFO structure and $600B CapEx [00:07:12] Meta's 20% layoffs and Charlie's read on bad CEO behavior [00:10:32] Freepik becomes Magnifi: $230M ARR, a million subscribers [00:13:10] Samsung Galaxy XR and Google x Gucci smart glasses [00:15:15] Google puts $40B into Anthropic — a cloud play [00:21:06] Spaces: turn-by-turn AR indoor navigation, no app required [00:41:13] 16 years in XR: how Zappar survived by being the cockroach
Brought to you by Zappar, the company behind Mattercraft — the leading visual development environment for immersive 3D web experiences. Start building at mattercraft.io.
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More from The AI XR Podcast.
Ted and Charlie open with a news roundup covering Colossal Biosciences’ real-world take on a Snow Crash robotic companion, a secretly recorded OpenAI meeting, and the wave of tech billionaires suddenly pledging away chunks of their fortunes. From there they dig into Robert Downey Jr. joining Snap, the relaunch of VR fitness app Supernatural, and why training and simulation keep proving to be VR’s most durable use case.
Ted and Charlie open with a quieter AI news week, giving them room to dig into XR hardware, including hands-on impressions of two new smart glasses, a Norway story on camera glasses restrictions, the shutdown of the XR Association, backlash over Meta’s Muse app, and a tour through AI’s fast-moving film scene.
Charlie, Ted, and Rony open on the week's AI political theater, from the sudden rebrand of AI to "superintelligence" to Dario Amodei's uncomfortable White House appearance. From there, the conversation covers AMD's acquisition of Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, the curious divergence between OpenAI's and Anthropic's paths toward going public, and Rony's read on why liability risk may be the real story behind both. They also dig into Nvidia's push to regulate AI safety at the chip level, a stranger-than-fiction report about Anthropic bringing religious leaders in to discuss whether Claude might be conscious, OpenAI's new companion AI "Dots," and a candid look at where consumer VR actually stands right now.
Cortney Harding steps in as guest co-host this week, joining Charlie to unpack a genuinely strong Meta Connect, new occluded VR glasses aimed squarely at the Vision Pro, a camera-free Ray-Ban, and Muse AI's surprise climb to the top of the app stores. From there, the conversation turns to Disney's newly created CTO role, the quiet fate of its big-money bets on Epic Games and Sora, and Jeffrey Katzenberg's open letter arguing entertainment has always been a technology business. They close out the news with a sharp exchange on Amazon's push into drone delivery and a pointed critique of DraftKings' use of AI to target its most engaged, and most vulnerable, customers.
Charlie and Rony open with Charlie's hands-on take on Snap's $2,200 Specs launch and Rony's theory on how big tech companies let smaller players pioneer risky new hardware first. From there, the conversation turns to a tense week in AI safety, sparked by Dario Amodei's call for frontier labs to slow down, and a sharp debate over whether the industry's talk of needing regulation is really about something else entirely. They close out the news with a look at how China is approaching AI development differently than the West, plus a genuinely stunning breakthrough in brain-computer interfaces.